Hi Vanessa,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were self-direction, benevolence, and security.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was conscientiousness.
You said your top three talents were social, analytic, and artistic / spatial.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to 4.0 gpa .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Run 3 miles under 30 minutes .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Feel good and accomplished and healthy .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Fatigue or mindset .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I’m tired, I’ll play my music louder .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in sports .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt anxious when receiving critical feedback, and anxious when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being job .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Something else .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .
In one word, you said it made you feel nice .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| Success/achievement can be unhealthy for you. |
| Interest is paramount for a fulfilling career (by my definition of fulfilling). |
| Effort counts twice |
| create a goal hierarchy to move towards an ultimate concern |
| set lower level goals that are specific, challenging, and public to be more effective |
| ask for advice not feedback |
| Change your situation |
| mentors are authoritative role models |
| Have a higher purpose |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
| |
| Nancy Gutzwiller |
| Vanessa is an incredibly uplifting person. She always made each person of the team feel valued by showing a genuine interest in each of us. She contributed to our discussions meaningfully and offered unique insights. Even when she shared that her week had been tougher, she still had a contagiously bright attitude.
Vanessa’s project was about cooking. It was neat to see her journey towards cooking more meaningfully and how she shared it with others. I appreciated how she shared that food can be a source of intimacy, identity, and vulnerability. I hadn’t ever considered that before.
|
| Tapiwa Chikwanda |
| Vanessa is a curious and attentive listener. I haven’t come across many people with her ability to ask genuine questions and have people open up. It is almost impossible to feel like you’re boring when conversing with her. At the same time, she has been equally willing to color our discussions with her personal experiences, whether they are positive or negative.
In our group discussions, another way her attentiveness would show up was through her introducing subtle and nuanced insights about the materials that the rest of our group may have glanced over. It has been a pleasure learning with and from her.
Her discovery project was about learning to cook. I liked seeing how it evolved from a basic necessity - her having left the Penn dining plan - into something enjoyable for its own sake. Her project highlighted how there can be rich emotional and cultural complexity within something that can be taken for granted. Much like she does in conversations, she put in the effort to go deeper into cooking. She tried a commendably broad range of cuisines while inviting those around her to enjoy the process and results. I am impressed that she went from barely knowing a single recipe to the 7 dishes she showcased - a testament to her resolve and grit.
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.